Hell yeh I got some requests!

Pics of where you mount the CPU, and the monitor.

Pics of the monitor running various things, like the DVD software, in full screen, WinAmp maximized. Maybe a good screenshot of a directory listing in "List" view mode, of a mp3 collection.

Umm umm Heheh. And please details on how hard it was to setup.

There is software out there called Powerstrip that some people have been using with the Xenarc that lets them run the 800x480 resolution without it stretching the screen and looking awkward. Have you heard of this stuff?

I will post some more questions later, and hopefully join you in the collection of these two things. All thought I may end up with the "Complete Mobile Solution" listed at the the top of page 2 in this thread, instead of the CPU you bought ($$$$$).

And thank you, and good luck.

And a lot of people in MP3Car buy from Spysupply, so I think you are OK

Ok, I'll look out for those things when I get the machine up and running. The in-car set up pics will have to wait. Right now I'm stuck setting up the back end stuff. It might actually turn out better this way though cause I can iron out any kinks before I do any mounting.

I think Xterrain mentioned power strip earlier. I'll load it up on the Mocha once I get it. Thanks for the info about spysupply. It puts me more at ease.

My brother came up with another idea. Yeah, uh oh. But anyway, here it is: is there a way to detect battery life/time remaining in your car battery? Aside from being another neat doodad on the X it would be pretty useful. I know laptops have this feature but I'm guessing the batteries they use have some sort of circuitry that allows them to. Anyone do this type of thing?

Any updates Zerstauber?

Heres a bit of the program I am working on

most featueres work, but i'm still working on it, of course.

dont laugh.. a lot of the stuff in it, like the bckgrgound picture, are just placeholders. im working more on code, will beautify it later

the buttons are big, because i am aiming this for myself, for the Xenarc Touchscreen.

Do you really have 38 terabytes connected to that?

-Mike

Man, what kinda carputer are YOU running Bobby! Hot damn! I really like you're front end. I was thinking about throwing something similar together but I doubt it would be that great. Let me know if you need a tester.

Well, updates...I've got good news and I've got bad news. It seems as if I'm destined to learn patience one way or another. The 700TSV is back-ordered due to the craziness at the docks. Spysupply was prompt in letting me know the situation and they offered me a 700TS which they have in inventory for 30 dollars less. I decided to stick with the 700TSV because I really wanted the auxiliary video inputs. That and I'm in this "never settle for less" groove I cant seem to shake. Ok, on to the good news!

I got the Mocha yesterday. I would have posted pics and info but I was too busy playing with the thing. It's freaking amazing! Since I don't have the screen I'm going to try to force the video into 800x480 on a normal monitor and see how it looks. Preliminary tests have been going well. Everything seems to work as it should. One thing to note is boot speed. Coming back from hibernation takes 20 seconds. If you're playing an mp3 at the time it'll come right back to where it left off and continue playing. Kinda impressive but what really grabs me is the suspend (S3). Four seconds. Four. And boom, you're listening to music and fully up and running. The only problem is that the S3 state continues to drain battery power. It's greatly diminished but it still draws. I'll have to find out how much exactly. I'd LOVE to use it if it wont kill my battery for an extended amount of time. I've yet to try DVD but I'm not worried about it.

Now I'm really anxious to see how the mocha fits under the Xterras seat. I'll have to start fabricating the docking station for it too but first I need measurements of the area it's going to be placed. So far I'm really impressed. I'll have a more concise report with pictures sometime during the weekend. Sooner if I can squeeze it in.

WOW! That Mocha sounds great.

It looks really high quality, and that they are using good components in it. I've been searching for a slightly cheaper small-footprint Computer, but a lot of them I am scared of. I once ordered a barebones computer for my girlfirend (few years ago) and the thing sucked, none of the drivers they gave would work on the hardware they gave, and Windows coulnd't recognize half the hardware even being in the computer.

DOH - No, thats not a terrabyte. That should be 38 gigs free, not 38,000 .. ALLTHOUGH That would be great! That would be several million .mp3s.

About my frontend: If you have Visual Basic, I can send you the sourcecode, when I get a bit more furthur along I'll post it for download. That way you can customize the pics and all that to your liking. It works relatively well. I'm just adding in whatever features i want.

Oh well, Good luck with the touch-screen, Hope it ships promptly! Did they give you an ETA on shipping?

The mocha is pretty well done. I was concerned about a number of things when I purchased it. The major issues on my mind were heat, noise, boot speed, and reliability. From the two days I've had it I've been able to cross out most of the things on that list. Its heat dissipation is excellent. The fans are a little noisy but nothing you would notice under your seat in the truck. Boot speed is amazing (S3). Reliability will take some time to gauge so I'm holding off on commenting on that. The XP install went off without a hitch too. Ditto for any driver installs.

I've mentioned earlier that my VB skills suck. Looks like I'd better start learning though since everyone here uses it. I wouldn't mind taking a look at the source. At least that way I have an incentive to start. If ya don't mind, please send it my way.

As far as the touch screen goes, they estimated they would have it in less than two weeks. They're located about 70 or so miles north of me so I figure it'll take two days afterwards to get it. Oh man...TWO WEEKS! I hate waiting.

Youve got Mail!

For those who have installed a caputer, how much interference do you feel when driving? I installed mine today and couldn't help but looking at it every few seconds while I am driving. I can definitely say that it intereferes with my driving. Maybe because the screen is too bright. Maybe I will get used to it, but I am scared it will cause an accident some day. How do people feel about those in dash navigation unit, don't they cause distraction to driver?

I think you will feel a lot of interference right at first. Just don't get overzealous or whatever if a bad song comes and you feel the need to look down to change it, or to scroll through songs or whatever while driving.

Just wait till a stop light, or pull over.

I find, that when I am in my car, if I am on the clelphone, my friends hate to talk to me, because I'll give my concenctration to driving, not the phone, so Its a lot of "umm umm haha" I dunno.

Its early, my brain hasnt started!

As for GPS Systems, my Garmin V is pretty small, but it wasn't much of a distratction. And it was mounted right in my view for driving. I found on the interestate, when I drove from Louisiana to Wisconsin, and then Back Home (18 hours each way, non stop haha, for a girl, I'm pathetic) that it was a little entertaining to watch it count down the miles. 1200. 1199, 1198, ............. When it hits 1000 GEEZ lol.

But, those GPS Systems, most of them have some type of audible altert that kinda "signals" you to look to where to turn. And they will usually, when you give it your route, it will give you the full list of turns, so you should have some clue what is next.

But if it's a good GPS, and accomplishes its purpose, I guess it should display so that it only takes a second of looking at the screen.

I dunno

What kind of screen, etc, did you end up getting?

I got a TH-5688 5.6" LCD from MP3cars.com. It's bulkier than I liked but weights very little. It's only $125 and the quality is not very good. But it serves my purpose well. I am road testing it now. My setup is:

PII 300 Laptop
192MB memory
DVD + MPEG2 decoder (for playing DVD)
8GB HDD (lots of MP3)
Mappoint + USB GPS (still trying to get it to work)
145W DC/AC inverter
5.6" LCD
wireless mouse/kb
FM modulator

I had it running for couple of days now. Everything seems to work fine. Gonna work on installing couple of cameras on front and rear bumpers for forward/backward bumper view :-)

also working on a power on relay system so the system will turn on/off by itself whenever I start the car,.
"
Would like to hear about your setup.

John

Ok, I finally got around to taking some pictures of the unit. I apologize in advance for the quality of the pics as I'm not quite the photographer.

I still haven’t received the touch screen unit so, in order to show what it will look like, I've set up a normal monitor to run at 800x480. It's as close as I can get for now folks.

First, the unit. It's a little blurry but here you can see the Mocha next to a regular (somewhat antiquated) hard drive. For a full fledged PC it's awfully small.


Next up is the Mocha wired up and shown with the DC power adapter. Note that the mouse is just about as wide as the Mocha.


Here is a shot of the monitor running 800x480.


Here is a shot of a wide screen DVD playing on the 800x480 screen. I posted earlier that I thought it would fill the screen just fine seeing as how it's supposed to have a 16:9 aspect ratio but that doesn't seem to be the case here. I'll retest as soon as I get the real LCD. You can tell how much black is bordering the actual playback by checking to see where the player controls are. They're located at the very bottom of the 800x480 screen.


I would have taken screen shots of the DVD but since it's using an overlay to display the movie things get a bit more complicated.

Next up is actual screen shots of winamp and the OBDII scan software.

Using winamp3 and stretching the default skin to fit the entire screen I got this:

I plan on finding a skin more appropriate for this application (as in REALLY big buttons and a larger playlist area) but this will do for now.

I was worried about the OBD scanner because it required 800x600 but as you can see here I can still hit all the buttons. It's not perfect but it'll do. At least until Xterrain gets a chance to finish up his cool front end.


If anyone wants higher quality pics let me know and I'll send them your way. Any more requests for tests or info? Keep in mind I'm short one screen and one Xterra. If anyone near downtown LA is willing to let me crawl around in their truck to take measurements I would greatly appreciate it!

John, I never put much thought into how much of a distraction this would be but now that you mention it that might be a problem. I know that lexus has a LCD on some of their cars/suvs and they make the default main screen two tone (blue and white) and displaying text info for temp and so forth. Maybe this would be a good idea for us too. It's really cool to have a lot of pretty graphics and flashy things flying across the screen but I might have to put something together that will take into account the fact that I'm moving. Thanks for the info! You've got my gears turning.

Heya!

May I ask how you got your screen into 800x480?

I want to get mine into that mode, to test out my software.

Did you use Powerstrip? I thougth I was good with software, but I can NOT for my life, figure out how to push it into 800x480?

And, that Mocha is incredible, looking great!
Bobby

Hey Bobby, I did use power strip. You'll have to right click on the power strip icon in the systray and navigate through the menus/tabs to find the screen resolution slider. You can't use the one in the display properties. This was done on a sis chipset video card with WinXP and the latest power strip. Let me know if you're still having problems and I'll help you out.

Hey Zers!

I put PowerStrip on my 2nd computer, and I had it in 800x480 resolution in under 10 seconds!

I just want to verify that you got the Mocha PC that you ordered into 800x480, that the video card or whatever it is in it, supported the mode fine?

You can find some detailed specs on that CPU at www.thinkgeek.com I believe its called the cappucino (sp?) One of the coolest gadget websites out there. Not to mention all other cool schwag for your geek needs.

You can find some detailed specs on that CPU at www.thinkgeek.com I believe its called the cappucino (sp?) One of the coolest gadget websites out there. Not to mention all other cool schwag for your geek needs.

Thinkgeek is a great gadget site but they don't have the Mocha. the Cappuccino versions are the older P3 based mini computers. A great route to go if you're on a budget. Some of them are actually smaller than the Mocha! They're all made by the same company but a major difference is the older versions are based on an intel chipset while the Mocha is based on a SIS chipset. That had me worried for a while (don't trust SIS) but so far so good.

Bobby, all my testing was done on the Mocha machine and a CRT monitor. So I was able to force the Mocha's vid card to 800x480. Aside from the fact that I lost my ability to change refresh rates (while at 800x480) there were no other issues. Even that problem will go away once I hook up the LCD which I'm told will ship in one week. Damn those docks!

Thanks for the great review. How does the system seem to perform? Any glichyness on playing a CD?MP3?

How about stability?

Not well. I was in Quebec City last October through December doing a flight test program. An 18" LCD display and one of the computers we used in the plane were consumer grade. Neither wanted to work in the morning after the plane sat outside in below freezing temps. The LCD was too dim to read and the hard drive in the PC didn't want to spin up. We had to get a heater to heat them up to the low end of their environmental range as part of our preflight.

Add another advantage to my laptop install.

Haha! Well, I live in Southern California. Cold spell means we have to trade out shorts for pants. And probably socks but that's rare. Berks don't feel right with socks. I'm not too worried about dealing with cold weather but heat can be a problem. My plans for the unit are to make it easily removable. I want it as mobile as possible so if I do, for whatever reason, have to take it out it'll be one quick tug and I'm off. Valid points though.

Salsa, so far the Mocha has been performing very well. I've been using hibernation and suspend every time I have to turn it off to simulate how it would be used in the truck. So far it's batting a thousand. No crashes, no weirdness what so ever. I've been playing MP3s on the thing since I got it and no problems there either. DVDs work fine too but I haven't tried out an audio CD in it. I'm sure it'll work but I've no idea how well it would play when it's being jostled around all over the place. As far as performance goes, well, video is nothing to write home about. Don't plan on playing Quake3 on this thing. Otherwise it feels pretty snappy.

Go HERE for a review of the system. If you're looking to buy one I'd check out the place I bought it from rather than the jadetech reseller that's mentioned in the review. It's probably cheaper to get it from the source.

Thanks, Being in I.T. this is something that I've been interested in doing for a while now. $$ and time are the hindrences. I'm thinking about building a custom system for this using a barebones system from [url=Http://www.Shuttle.com][url=Http://www.Shuttle.com][url=Http://www.Shuttle.com]Http://www.Shuttle.com[/url][/url][/url] or [url=Http://www.Checkercube.com][url=Http://www.Checkercube.com][url=Http://www.Checkercube.com]Http://www.Checkercube.com[/url][/url][/url]

I guess the smaller you go the more money you pay. Check this one though, it's a Pentium III 1.3gig and it's like the size of a cd-rom:




the site: www.littlepc.com